A Justice Site
California State University, Dominguez Hills
Created: January 2, 2002
Latest update: January 2, 2002
jeannecurran@habermas.org.
The Wolf I FeedOn Wednesday, January 2, 2002, David Loy wrote:
Professor Curran,Richard Koenigsberg mentioned your web-page on adversarialism, and after checking it out I would like to add my two-cents [well, somewhat more than that...] below.
with best wishes,
David Loy
The Nonduality of Good and Evil If only there were evil people somewhere, insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart? ‹ Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Because it emphasizes mindfulness of our thought-processes, Buddhism encourages us to be wary of antithetical concepts: not only good and evil, but success and failure, rich and poor, even the duality between enlightenment and delusion. We distinguish between the opposing terms because we want one rather than the other, yet the meaning of each depends upon the other. That sounds abstract, but such dualities are actually quite troublesome for us. If, for example, it is important to live a pure life (however purity is understood), then I need to be preoccupied with avoiding impurity. If wealth is important for me, then I am also worried about avoiding poverty. We cannot take one lens without the other, and such pairs of spectacles filter our experience of the world.
What does this mean for the duality of good versus evil? One way the interdependence of good and evil shows itself: we don¹t feel we are good unless we are fighting against evil. We can feel comfortable and secure in our own goodness only by attacking and destroying the evil outside us. St. George needs that dragon in order to be St. George. His heroic identity requires it. And, sad to say but true, that this is why we like wars: they cut through the petty problems of daily life, and unite us good guys here against the bad guys over there. There is fear in that, of course, but it is also exhilarating. The meaning of life becomes clearer.
We all love this struggle between good (us) and evil (them). It is, in its own way, deeply satisfying. Think of the plot of the James Bond films, the Star Wars films, the Indiana Jones films. The bad guys are caricatures: ruthless, maniacal, without remorse, so they must be stopped by any means necessary, We are meant to feel that it is okay‹to tell the truth, pleasurable‹to see violence inflicted upon them. Because the villains like to hurt people, it¹s okay to hurt them. Because they like to kill people, it¹s okay to kill them. After all, they are evil and evil must be destroyed.
What is this kind of story really teaching us? That if you want to hurt someone, it is important to demonize them first in other words, to fit them into your good-vs.-evil script. That is why the first casualty of all wars is truth.
Such stories are not just entertainment. In order to live, we need air, water, food, clothes, shelter, friends‹and we need stories, because they teach us what is important in life. They give us models of how to live in a complicated, confusing world. Until the last hundred years or so, the most important stories for most people were religious: the life of Jesus or the Buddha, and the lives of their followers, etc. Today, however, the issue is not whether a story is an ennobling one, a good myth to live by, but the bottom line: will it sell?
The story of good and evil sells because it is simple and easy to understand, yet from a Buddhist viewpoint it can be dangerously deceptive. It keeps us from looking deeper, from trying to discover causes. Once something has been identified as evil, no more is there a need to explain it, only a need to fight it.
By contrast, Buddhism focuses on the three unwholesome roots of evil, also known as the three poisons: greed, ill will, and delusion. In place of the struggle between good and evil, Buddhism emphasizes ignorance and enlightenment. The basic problem is one of self-knowledge: do we really understand what motivates us?
In Disney¹s Lion King there is the noble king, his loving wife and their innocent cub Simba, on the one hand, and the evil uncle on the other side. The evil uncle hatches a plot to kill the king and eliminate Simba, who escapes but eventually returns to . . . you get the idea. All very predictable and boring, although visually beautiful.
In contrast, one of the many interesting things about Hayao Miyazaki¹s animated films is the way they avoid the simple duality between good and evil. In Princess Mononoke, for example, various people do bad things, not because they are simply evil, but because they are complicated: often selfish and greedy, and therefore stupid in the sense that they are so narrowly focused on what they want that they do not see the wider implications of their actions.
I do not know if Miyazaki considers himself a Buddhist, but his films seem very Buddhist to me. Compare the following passage from the Sutta Nipata, where Ajita asks of the Buddha, "What is it that smothers the world? What makes the world so hard to see? What would you say pollutes the world and threatens it most?"
"It is ignorance which smothers," the Buddha replies, "and it is heedlessness and greed which make the world invisible. The hunger of desire pollutes the world, and the great source of fear is the pain of suffering."
Because this view offers us a better understanding of what actually motivates people (all of us, including terrorists). It also implies a very different way to address the problems created by ignorance and desire and violence: not a new holy war against evil, but a less dramatic struggle to transform greed into generosity, ill will into love, and ignorance into wisdom.
A Native American grandfather was talking to his grandson about how he felt about the tragedy on September 11th.
He said, "I feel as if I have two wolves fighting in my heart. One wolf is vengeful, angry, violent. The other wolf is loving, forgiving, compassionate."
The grandson asked him, "Which wolf will win the fight in your heart?"
The grandfather answered, "The one I feed."